Kaweahhttp://kaweah.com
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.Thu, 12 Mar 2015 20:18:10 +0000en-UShourly1(small world)http://kaweah.com/2014/09/19/small-world/
http://kaweah.com/2014/09/19/small-world/#commentsFri, 19 Sep 2014 12:07:31 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=4938The universe seems to be
Very big, and who’s to say
it’s alone.

Somewhere out there,
someone is just like you.

Somewhere out there,
Someone just like you
is walking
With someone like me.

]]>http://kaweah.com/2014/09/19/small-world/feed/0The Peace-Loving Elementshttp://kaweah.com/2014/09/11/the-peace-loving-elements/
http://kaweah.com/2014/09/11/the-peace-loving-elements/#commentsThu, 11 Sep 2014 21:34:10 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=4958The cataract grinds away the granite
But water only wants to find a low place
And take the form of its container,
Conform to make its peace.

Earth falls too—
Crashes down on itself
Till the land is level,
At peace.

The wind blows savage over the plain,
Falls from ridge to trough and
The gradient is lost. No high, no low,
No sound but peace.

]]>http://kaweah.com/2014/09/11/the-peace-loving-elements/feed/1Suffocantshttp://kaweah.com/2014/09/04/suffocants/
http://kaweah.com/2014/09/04/suffocants/#commentsThu, 04 Sep 2014 22:54:16 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=4969They breathe only what can be inhaled
from others. That is their way.

When you had no more air for them,
their memory of you was a bible.
They buried the book and mourned it
as you lay breathless, solitary,
according to their law.

They encircled their book,
making weeping sounds,
embalming it in rose water
and saline solution.

I stepped up secretly, discretely
pushed each one into the hole,
back after back, there not being faces.

The tomb was spacious
(The book was large).
The earth weighed heavily on the spade,
but it rested well upon them.

They have come to no harm, do not cry.
They lie there today,
sipping each other’s air.

]]>http://kaweah.com/2014/09/04/suffocants/feed/0The Stackshttp://kaweah.com/2014/08/10/the-stacks-2/
http://kaweah.com/2014/08/10/the-stacks-2/#commentsSun, 10 Aug 2014 22:55:52 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=5207I don’t recall how it began
I was asleep at the time
maybe long ago in a boy’s dream or some
half-remembered adventure
wandering again
through that vast and foreign city of childhood
that never once was the same
in so many days and dreams
maybe this time he’d lost someone
I don’t recall
Hearst Avenue or some such
boulevard walking downward
a fenced park to his side an iron gate
concrete path neoclassic façade the
pinkness of granite
the cherrywood doors ajar
Stepping up cold stone by stone
slipped with the night air through the entryway
to the dark inside a broad desk a bronze reading lamp
too dim to penetrate the dense air and a woman
old white hair skin folded in ribbed shadows
in the green lamplight seated at the desk
stood and turned not seeing me walked out from behind
the oak battlement turned his way cocked her head to say
follow me patron and so he did back to the stacks
the green lamplight remained fading at our backs
her ancient wiry frame hung a knee-length dress
black in the green light vanished here and there
as she passed through the shadows of
the densely packed shelves
the knocking of her heels
echoed off the bindings and the floor
her bunned hair was black now in the dim light
the curve of her hips was complete
each leg in fullness but undressed
seeming to note my hesitation she turned back
she was young she was fruitful she
wore the old woman’s dress
but it embraced her now and her glasses had the same frames
but the glass was dark as the stacks somehow I knew
I knew her from somewhere she stopped and turned and
she pulled a book off-shelf handed it to him and
she leaned against the shelving and waited
I looked through the volume all the pages were naked
he looked up to her and showed her two of the empty sheets
she turned away to the stack and reached up
lifting off her heels to her toes
dangerously drew out another volume
I could hardly make out the black silhouette of her face
her hair her dress her calves in the crescent light
her bow-like length flush against the mass of bindings
she pulled the book down and I turned timidly as
she handed the book to him and
I handed the empty book back only to find
the next book was empty so
she led me down the slot canyon handing him
volume after volume of emptiness
sometimes the pages were fresh
white and glossy sometimes they were
yellowed and cracked with time and
the verdant librarian she led me
though the shadow to where the stacks ended at a wall
the shelves there empty but for a single book
I could see this clearly in the light of a naked bulb
that shone from high on the wall I could see that
the librarian’s dress though black was not opaque
I could see her through it in the white light as she
handed him the lone book that he could not open
because of what I saw under the linen
some kind of writing
the script glowed dimly in the light in the black fabric
he reached for her collar and turned it out
there was writing
in some Latin form there was another collar
under the collar white and it too had writing and
he turned it over and I saw the deeper layers
and I licked his fingertips and he peeled back the sheets
back as the pages of her breast opened a white rose
the petals turned silently the words
incomprehensible and familiar
he dug through into her pages and I
listened to her breathing clearly
and deeply
with every new page my hands tingle
to the touch of every silk petal
but the fingers begin to quake and stumble
and the pages slip out of their grasp
and the dreamer slips out of the dream
eyes fixed to the ceiling
we listen to the breathing

]]>http://kaweah.com/2014/08/10/the-stacks-2/feed/0Jeffers and Firehttp://kaweah.com/2014/02/24/5172/
http://kaweah.com/2014/02/24/5172/#commentsTue, 25 Feb 2014 00:23:54 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=5172Here’s the presentation that I delivered (in part, having run out of time) at the 20th conference of the Robinson Jeffers Association in Carmel, California on February 16, 2014. It might interest anyone into Robinson Jeffers, the Central Coast of California, fire, Moby-Dick, Heraclitus, Zoroastrianism, etc.

]]>http://kaweah.com/2014/02/24/5172/feed/0Pomegenesishttp://kaweah.com/2013/12/14/pomegenesis/
http://kaweah.com/2013/12/14/pomegenesis/#commentsSat, 14 Dec 2013 17:56:11 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=5015In the beginning, Ararat and the noor seed,
And the night’s skin cracked and the sun slipped through,
Fat pomegranate boiling up with red arils
In thousands, and a little snow on the greater cone
Thawed and watered the seed that through spring
And summer became the noor tree.

And summer cooled and autumn bloomed,
And red orbs grew fat on the tree’s fingers,
Weighed down her mighty arms to the earth
And the sun came down from the mountain,
Like pomegranate swelled and cracked,
And birds flew in, cut the red skin and grew
Fat and round on the tree, that bride
Who cast the virile fruit to the ground,
And the aril and the earth and the sun and the snow
Gave birth to Ararat’s children.

Three pomegranates fell down from heaven: One for the storyteller, one for the listener, and one for the world.

]]>http://kaweah.com/2013/12/14/pomegenesis/feed/1Original Sinhttp://kaweah.com/2013/11/13/original-sin/
http://kaweah.com/2013/11/13/original-sin/#commentsWed, 13 Nov 2013 13:49:04 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=5005To the poet Robinson Jeffers, the eagle is a symbol of something like divine consciousness. Man, in contrast, is more like an inauspicious microbe. Man and eagle do have this in common: they both use fire. This is obvious in the case of man. For Jeffers, the eagle is an opportunist, seeking game and carrion in the wake of wildfires.

The key difference between eagle and man—according to Jeffers—can be seen in the poem Original Sin. [1] Man’s rise and fall are identified with one act: man’s harnessing of fire. One might make a case that the chief sin in the poem is man’s cruelty, and human cruelty is surely a sin that Jeffers decries, but there is also a side to Jeffers that laments the rise of civilization, and what better image is there for the rise of civilization than the taming of fire?

The old stories have it that when Zeus got word that Prometheus had given fire to man, Zeus had Prometheus tied down so that an eagle (or vulture) would eternally devour the rebellious Titan’s liver. This punishment might well have seemed justifiable to Jeffers. He did seem to think Prometheus a fool:

And this young man was not of the sad race of Prometheus, to waste himself in favor of the future.[2]

All this original sin is perfectly natural, of course, and we must accept it as such, terrible though it may be.

But we are what we are, and we might remember not to hate any person, for all are vicious;

Natural though it all may be, there is tragedy in the powerful knowledge and tools of man as well as in his cruelty. In Original Sin, fire is the symbol for all three.

One of the themes that appeared in earnest when Robinson Jeffers published Tamar and Other Poems was the stone theme (hawks and eagles didn’t really appear until Cawdor, three releases and four years later). Tamar was published with shorter poems with titles like “To the Rock …” and “To the Stone-Cutters.” The next release, Roan Stallion, began with the poem “Granite and Cypress.”

Stone, for Jeffers, tended to mean granite, and even more specifically sea-granite[4], his term for the exotic granite that pushed up through the marine rock west of the San Andreas Fault. Before the Jefferses purchased those 16 lots at Carmel Point in 1919 [5], it is debatable whether stone ever meant very much to the poet.

Granite is not the dominant bedrock of Carmel-by-the-Sea or of the Central California coast in general. The coastal zone is west of the San Andreas Fault, and so its bedrock is primarily marine in origin. There are, however, exposures of granite throughout the coast of Central California. This granite is exotic to the terrain, as granite is not a marine rock. It is believed to have been sliced off of the Sierra Nevada Batholith many million years ago and moved slowly up the coast along the San Andreas Fault. Thus there is an outcrop of Sierra sea-granite at Carmel Point, and stone throughout Jeffers’s life work.

]]>http://kaweah.com/2013/11/11/the-advent-of-stone/feed/0Elijah’s Burnt Offeringshttp://kaweah.com/2013/11/10/burnt-offerings/
http://kaweah.com/2013/11/10/burnt-offerings/#commentsSun, 10 Nov 2013 14:02:42 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=4975When our son Michael was ten years old, he’d been given a school assignment to find two poems. When I saw what Michael had found I was a little shocked. Soon after that, his teacher reported to us that Michael’s choices weren’t appropriate for 5th grade.

They were both Jeffers poems. If memory serves, one of them was Shine, Perishing Republic—let’s just say not exactly the Pledge of Allegiance. The other poem began with a woman torturing a horse. Admittedly, I was amused that our son had got into a bit of trouble because I’d left Robinson Jeffers lying around the house. Not Hustler magazine—Robinson Jeffers: environmental visionary, nature mystic, prophet, poet of California.

The poem with the woman torturing the horse, titled Apology for Bad Dreams, is reportedly based upon actual events, but that’s really beside the point. People are sometimes cruel. We know that. Why, then, is Jeffers so tenacious about telling these stories about sin and mayhem? Is it just that sensationalism sells? Sex and violence, after all, had been good to Jeffers. This is the critique of his work that this dark poem seems to answer.

It is important to keep in mind that much of what Jeffers wrote was written in the aftermath of the Great War, now known as World War I. The Great War was perhaps the watershed event of the 20th Century. It changed everything, including Robinson Jeffers. It transformed Jeffers into a radical anti-war poet, and it seems to me it brought out his demons.

There was some lag-time involved. So far removed in idyllic Carmel, war reports must have lacked immediacy. During the actual event, Jeffers appeared to have been something of a war enthusiast at times, having more than once expressed a desire to enlist. But the grim dawn of the modern age did finally arrive over Bohemia-by-the-Sea, and in the blood-red light of the new era, Carmel ceased to be a pretty place, and Jeffers stopped writing pretty rhymes.

Apology for Bad Dreams is a poem in four parts (I–IV). It can be summed up thus: beautiful places, like capricious gods, call out for tragedy; they must be appeased with cruel sacrifices, real or imagined.

The voice of the poem is of a man who lives in the cultural wasteland left by the Great War, looking out across a beautiful landscape, thinking about God.

Part I. Beauty has turned dark, evil. In all its power and profundity, it wishes us ill. You don’t feel it? Remember the War. Think about the trenches full of corpses. Remember the poison gas, the deformed faces and bodies. Let your eyes pile up the dead, brother by brother, until you have piled millions upon millions. Now, look at the beautiful landscape, in the purple light, heavy with redwood. Look—the beautiful Pacific: it resembles a stone knife-blade. See? And look: a farm, there—so miniscule against the mountainside, so insignificant, there: a woman is punishing a horse …

… The ocean
Darkens, the high clouds brighten, the hills darken together.
Unbridled and unbelievable beauty …
… What said the prophet? “I create good: and I create evil: I am the Lord.” (CP 1:208–9)

Part II. So there you have it: all this is the Lord’s doing: the beautiful, the grotesque. But this Lord is not Yahweh or Allah. This is Jeffers’s spirit of place, the coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places. The beauty comes up from the core, as does the evil. The beauty has now become grotesque:

… The dykes of red lava and black [demand] what Titan?
The hills like pointed flames
Beyond Soberanes, the terrible peaks of the bare hills under the sun,
what immolation? … (CP 1:209)

The poet sees the evil in the world; ancient, primordial evil—Biblical evil. He sees it in himself, his humanity. He sees it in God. He cannot defeat it; he must appease it. No, this is not a rational response to evil. There’s nothing objective or rational about the world that the poet sees. Reason is no comfort, no help, no use. All we know is that the God of the land craves cruelty. This deep, divine cruelty calls for a primitive response: sacrifice, burnt offerings.

Part III. The former people of this land, all killed off, were a sacrifice. They remain a sacrifice so long as they are remembered. Once forgotten, the sacrifice expires. So long as that memory survives it protects us, reminds us of the cruelty of God, and satiates His appetite for misery.

Part IV. But surely with Jeffers’s pantheistic God all action is ultimately self-inflicted. The God that deforms humanity only deforms himself. Making man self-loathing, he casts self-hate upon himself. Why? There is no making sense of it. There is no reason; only cruelty, power, and passion.

There is a belief among some Jeffers scholars that this poem is a key to Jeffers’s motivation and philosophy as a poet. Even further, it has been suggested more than once that this is his ars poetica, his treatise on poetry itself. The poem does indeed reference his own work and it does strive to justify one of his major themes, but I for one don’t think it definitively addresses Jeffers’s views of his poetry or of poetry in general. There is just too much that this poem leaves out. Refreshingly, Apology does not preach about poetry as some of Jeffers’s other poems do. Alas, I prefer it to anything that might represent an ars poetica. More to the point, I do believe that Jeffers often had the kind of tortured thoughts that this poem seems to reveal, and I find its revelations profound, intimate, and beautiful.

]]>http://kaweah.com/2013/11/10/burnt-offerings/feed/0Hotel Jerichohttp://kaweah.com/2013/10/16/hotel-jericho-2/
http://kaweah.com/2013/10/16/hotel-jericho-2/#commentsWed, 16 Oct 2013 12:55:00 +0000http://kaweah.com/?p=4919Old Jacksonboro Road crosses the Savannah Highway within a half hour of Charleston. The junction has a name: Jericho. Today it is considered part of the town of Adams Run (as though you know where that is).

The Notre Maison Boys HomeSource: Rebecca Reconnu Biggs Grainger

Jericho was once the site of a hotel, a store with gas pumps named Caison’s Groceries, and a school annex for Coloreds. The store had a post office inside. Mom and Dad bought the old hotel in 1970, when we returned to South Carolina. I was just 5. We didn’t stay there long. Sometime after we left South Carolina again in 1972, it all burned down in a couple of fires (I have an alibi: I was out of state).

The hotel had three stories, if one counts the spacious attic with dormer windows and and old four-legged bathtub. It had exterior wooden stairways which functioned as fire escapes. It had ten bedrooms and four bathrooms. When we moved in, one of the bedrooms had a sagging floor. The bathrooms were equipped with showers, but none of them functioned. We all had to bathe in the attic, which doubled as my sister Duska’s bedroom.

Around 1964, it had been converted to a boys’ home by David A Reconnu and his wife Nima. They operated the boys’ home for about four years.

Source: Thomas C. Hucks

The adjacent store (peeking through on the right edge of the above photo) came equipped with a soda vending machine that would allow a mischievous boy to yank a bottle out without paying. The trick to it was not to brag about snagging a free soda to one’s mom.

When Mom and Dad first saw the hotel in mid-1970, they saw a place that might serve well as a home for seven and a dog, a chiropractic office, and a Bahá’í center. I must confess that if I were driving down the Savannah Highway and I saw a FOR SALE sign posted in front of that old hotel, I would have been sorely tempted to stop for a look-see.

Among my favorite memories of Jericho was the the trash pile in the back, all blackened from the last fire and wet from the last rain. I can still smell the aroma of molten plastics, rotting food, and rusted scrap metal. I also remember when a crab, recently taken from the ocean, got a hold of a cat’s tail. I’m not sure how that happened, but now I suspect it probably got some help.

Across the highway, there was a hotel of a different kind that was even more noteworthy: a maze of tunnels that some neighbor kids had dug out. My memory of that system of tunnels has endured in my mind as one of the great achievements of kidkind.

It turned out the Hotel Jericho had too many maintenance and repair issues, and it wasn’t easy to unload. Mom and Dad weren’t able to sell it for a couple years after we left Jericho.